Bethesda’s rageful and whimsical E3 conference

Oh Todd Howard, you beautiful beast you. There was so much of you at E3 you had to promote Fallout 76 twice? Anyway, Bethesda’s conference was pretty good, let’s take a closer look.

They knocked it out pretty hard with actual Andrew W. K. giving a live concert of Ready to Die featured prominently in Rage 2’s reveal trailer. I mean I think it was amazing although it’s pretty funny watching the utterly confused reactions of the live audience. Well this is what you get for bringing Andrew W. K. to a room full of rich people and investors, these guys really don’t know how to party.

The guys spent a whole lot of time talking about Rage 2 and even showed a snipet of the gameplay from one of the missions, somewhat light on the story, but heavy on shooting punk bandits and crashing space objects into Earth. Fun times. The open world of Rage 2 looks interesting, I very much want to see if there really is a lot to explore there.

We then ventured into Elder Scrolls (and don’t worry, we’re gonna come back here) with the next expansion for The Elder Scrolls Online Summerset, ostensibly heavily focused on the story. I definitely dig that.

Next we took a detour to the land of FPS with Doom Eternal and Quake Champions, two IPs under Bethesda’s wings. The outstanding success of Doom’s reboot has spawned a next title and Quake team is working hard to deliver us “the fastest and most fun multiplayer shooter, period”. Lofty words for sure. Community Manager for Quake Champions talked at length about their plans for the future and E-sports.

We then went to the moon with Prey to take a peak at the trailer to the upcoming Mooncrash expansion, promising a bizarre and otherworldly (heh) experience, quite hilariously set to You Spin Me Right Round. ‘Ts pretty good, take a look yourself.

Then we got a trailer for the next Wolfenstein- Youngblood, a coop title for two players where you take on the roles of young members of the resistance in the wacky re-imagination of the modern world where Nazis were not defeated.

And then… Then Todd Howard came. And what a Todd Howard he was. I gotta hand it to the man, he has presence, he managed to really capture the attention of the audience and pulled off an amazing prank by showing us a joke trailer to Very Special Edition of Skyrim, bringing Skyrim to such platforms like Amazon Alexa and Samsung refrigerators. What started as a joke is no longer one as reportedly you can actually now “play” Skyrim on Alexa (thanks PC gamer).

Then Todd talked at length, and I DO mean at length, about Fallout 76. We’ve seen plenty of gameplay showing us basic mechanics, coop, base-building and most fascinatingly- a nuclear launch mechanics whereby players can cooperate to gain access to the underground nuclear facilities to send nukes at each other. I guess we know now what happened to the Wasteland. It wasn’t the war that destroyed everything. It was gamers throwing nukes at each other, it makes perfect sense. Real people would have the sensibility to stop. Gamers wouldn’t.

Finally Todd revealed two upcoming projects the studio has been working for, a personal passion project of theirs- Starfield and, of course, the big important one, the big daddy himself, The Elder Scrolls 6 (teaser below).

Thanks to Todd Howard who managed to run the show throughout, this was an enjoyable conference. Not nearly as jam-packed full of news as the Microsoft’s one, but definitely solid.

worth checking out

The era of human civilization has ended with the meteor wiping out everything. The wasteland has taken everything from Walker, the last ranger- his family, his friends, his dignity. Now all that he has left is rage.

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